It was 1992. I grew up in Brazil, never was interested in games, and the only computer games I had access to anyway was Ultima on the computer friend of my mom's, Pong on a friend's Atari. Oh, and I do remember playing a soccer game on the NES and finding gaming truly boring.

    We had moved out of my mother's apartment in Highland Towers, Malaysia (which funnily, would fall down a few year later, but forget that for now) to a house nearer to my stepbrother's school. My mother's new husband, an ex-diplomat, finally unboxed his Tandy computer that he had kept away for years. I got hold of the manual, learned how to mess around with it, then I found a box pictured in the beginning of the article.

   I was drawn to the back of the box, and was blown away.


  I loaded it up, loved the whole thing of having to come to work, check mail, get stuff in locker room and go through briefing. There was some frustration as every time I would go and drive off my car would break down and I would lose the game, but I discovered that there was a BBS dedicated to just Quest games. After some tinkering in my school's computer lab, I read that you, as a cop, had to walk around your vehicle and check it for tampering before driving off every time.

  The game was great. And it taught me how to play poker, and best of all, led me to Space Quest and King's Quest.  It also got me to enter the internet for the first time. It was kinda magical, dialing and connecting to the board with nothing but some instructions printed from a dot-matrix printer (whereas today we have setup Wizard)  plus the index page of an issue of Chips 'n Bits Magazine as a rudimentary "google" to know BBS boards to enter.



   If anyone were to ask me if I missed BBS, I would say yes. Terribly. It was non-commercial. It was a hobby, just some guys who decided that having computers and a telephone line would be great for communicating and sharing ideas. There are some other things I miss, like;

   The satisfaction when you finally got connected (we are truly spoiled with broadband and google). The puzzling times some 12-year old would find his way to a board I was on (How the hell did he get this number?). The fun of browsing through someone's bmp/gif collection of smutty porn. (Now even a safe image search gives you that).  The whole phone number until handshake dialup experience (now its all about IPs)..


   Now its all about branding, advertising and the like. While USENET was there first, and BBS was quickly replaced when windows 95 came around, its spirit still lives on in Facebook. That was my first experience with the internet, and it was innocent, free and best of all, fun.